If Tiananmen happened today

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This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent bloody police crackdown in Beijing. As commentators and China experts have been noting in a series of ‘Tiananmen at 20’ assessments, quite a bit has changed since then. The country has modernized at a dizzying clip and now owns one of the biggest and fastest growing economies in the world. And as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s visit there this week has indicated, U.S. officials are more careful than ever about offending Chinese government sensibilities, especially given how much of our debt the country now holds.

At the same time, by many accounts China’s human-rights record has only deteriorated over the last two decades. And if the government’s nervous preparations for the anniversary date are any indication, the Tiananmen violence remains a collective wound that was never allowed to heal fully.

Those developments prompt a number of questions about the anniversary of the 1989 events, particularly in terms of how they relate to the Beijing cityscape. (And particularly if you’re inclined to think about the relationship between protest and the spaces of the city.) If large-scale protests were to happen now in Beijing, would they take place, as they did in 1989, in and around Tiananmen Square itself? Would they take place in any square, for that matter? Could Beijing’s Olympic class of architectural landmarks -- Herzog and de Meuron’s ‘bird’s nest’ stadium, which sits in the middle of a gigantic plaza, or Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV tower -- become backdrops for a new round of unrest?

In a digitized, networked age, that is to say, what is the role of the mass protest on symbolic ground?

Certainly if any Tiananmen-style anger were to boil up among young Chinese these days, protesters would try to organize gatherings by text message or Twitter. But as the Times’ Barbara Demick reported this week, China has shut down Twitter and several popular blogs -- including one operated by the artist Ai Weiwei -- in advance of the Tiananmen anniversary. Digital media are often seen as a liberating force in China. But the more popular a site or service becomes, the more easily it can be blocked by the government.

Maybe that means an old-fashioned gathering of bodies in the symbolic heart of a city is more likely, rather than less, as a means of protest as the government gets better at blocking various kinds of digital access. Certainly the solidarity produced by standing with a crowd -- particularly a threatened crowd, or a crowd that represents the emerging voice of a new generation of political leadership or attitudes -- remains uniquely powerful.

One clue along those lines came Thursday evening Chinese time, as tens of thousands of people gathered in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to mark the Tiananmen anniversary. Organizers put the size of the crowd at 150,000, and it was easily the largest Tiananmen vigil since 1991. The anger of the crowd -- and perhaps its size -- was boosted by the recent publication of a memoir of the 1989 events by Zhao Ziyang, at the time general secretary of the Communist Party. I’m sure text-messaging played a role in coordinating the event. But the old -- books that move public opinion, protests in places like Victoria Square -- is never entirely replaced by the new.

In 1989, images of protesters facing down tanks alarmed the world but in other ways the Chinese government was able to keep pictures and accounts of the Tiananmen violence under wraps. Though most scholars estimate that several hundred protesters were killed, few images of those victims -- in fact, few images at all suggesting how bloody the confrontation turned out to be -- reached the global press.

And as Patrick Witty noted on the New York Times Lens blog, even the famous image (and video, above) of a lone man in a white shirt facing down a column of tanks ‘is largely blocked on the Internet in China. Despite its iconic status and historical significance elsewhere, most young people there do not recognize the photograph.’

Such a tight campaign of image control seems impossible now: In the Internet age, once a cat’s out of the bag, it’s out for good. (And probably complaining within 24 hours on Twitter about the dismal conditions in said bag.) In that sense, what has changed is not where or how protest happens but government’s ability to define any event after the fact completely on its own terms. And that, in turn, makes an old-fashioned protest a bigger threat to an authoritarian regime than ever.

All of this speculation, of course, sidesteps the fact that the generation of Chinese now in their teens and 20s -- prime protesting years -- appears to be more conservative and nationalistic than the one that filled the streets in 1989. (The New Yorker called this generation the ‘neocon nationalists.’) And so at least in mainland China, maybe it won’t be the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen that prompt a new wave of protests but, instead, the 40th, 50th or 75th.

--Christopher Hawthorne

Caption: Tens of thousands of people attend a candlelight vigil at Hong Kong’s Victoria Park Thursday. Credit: Vincent Yu / Associated Press